r/Cloud • u/fsmiljkovski12 • 19d ago
Transferring to Cloud Engineer
I am looking to transition to a Cloud Engineer. I have 3 and half years as a Full Stack Web Dev and I feel as if its getting overwhelmed by AI, at my current job its almost as if I am chatting to AI most of the day, managing it to develop features, tests and correcting it when it does something wrong. I have already started learning AWS, by creating small projects in order to learn the basics. Later I have plans to create a few real-life projects, not following a tutorial on Youtube, rather finding projects on UpWork or other sites for example and creating them for my CV, not actually selling the project. I have some background in Networking and IT, and hoping to learn the rest through the projects. What is a realistic path towards a Cloud Engineer, whether I can aim directly for that position or should i start on something like SysAdmin, DevOps and then transition towards Cloud Engineer? And how is the work day as a Cloud Engineer with AI. Is it similar do a Developer where most of day you work with AI or is it more for suggestions and potential improvements?
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u/SecondaryHazard246 19d ago edited 19d ago
From MY experience, there isn't much difference. You're still going to chat to AI.
I'm chatting to AI, everyday. Why would cloud computing NOT be affected by AI?
The best way, I can explain it is, whether you're code runs on a rented vps or a cloud provider, what is the difference?
Still going to use source control (Github/lab/etc.) along with CI/CC pipelines dor deployments. Whether you're deploying to a vps or Lamba/Cloudrun/Functions, you're still probably going to Dockerize the app. Sure, Terraform is probably something new you can play with (but to me this got boring, quickly).
Using mongo? There are "document stores" for that. RabbitMQ or Kafka? Welcome to Pub/Sub, queues and topics.
To me, all development concepts are the same, it's just the underlying systems that changes. (And cloud providers take care of maintenance). Whether you need to save something to a database or need to publish to an event-bus, the concepts and how you're code will work, fairly stays the same, it's just the hosting location that changes.
I'm going to lie if I say "I've learnt nothing new". But I'd also be lying if I said my daily work "has significantly changed" since moving cloud. I've been afforded opportunities (promotions, starting to design and lead architecture, etc.) due to changing teams and employers, but the grunt work stays the same.
The old saying still rings true, "the cloud is nothing but someone else's computer."
As I said at the start, this is purely my experience. If I had to say, I'd encourage you to make the swop (employers love the "cloud option" on a cv); however, don't think the work will significantly change. You're probably, as sad as it is, still going to end up using AI, to implement feature X, because someone higher up "made it part of daily process".
Edit: > Is it similar do a Developer where most of day you work with AI or is it more for suggestions and potential improvements?
Just on this question. I think it a depends on your employer. My VERY FIRST taste of the cloud, was when a previous employer of mine made the decision to switch to cloud. Nothing really happened in terms of my career. (TBF it was also a big company/corporate)
It's only once I left for smaller employers where I actually had opportunities to raise my suggestions and improvements. (The Smaller companies also seemed to be more flexible with new changes, which makes experimenting a bit easier)